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Ezequiel Suranyi, Gigi, 2003, Print on fabric | | |
Ezequiel Suranyi, 'Highbury', exhibition of original prints
Prestigious publicity agent Carlos Bayala, gives us a profile of Ezequiel Suranyi, a young Argentinean artist based in London, who works obsessively on one theme: football* (as Suranyi writes it, in place of fútbol). Bayala presents his point of view regarding the artist here, in addition to suggesting a few questions about several aesthetic concepts in art and publicity today.
It's probable that Ezequiel Suranyi is crazy. This is not to praise him; the condition of madness is a fad that inhabits every corner of the world that, with further vulgarity, today's marketing and publicity just adore.
Instead, for Chesterton, to be crazy is a dignified, singular condition: it requires the candidate to loose everything they may possess in this life, except reason. The madman is then a romantic hero, a martyr condemned to philosophy.
Suranyi takes it to an extreme, hardly challenging this definition: he chooses to loose even reason in exchange for never being too far from a football stadium seat on the day of a memorable game. Proof of this lies in the infinite, desperate transactions and pathological persistence that he has gone through to obtain credentials for entry into the most remote stadiums in the world. In exchange, Suranyi will obtain colorful photos of seas of human beings, dynamic to the point of becoming abstract. Notoriety and excess move him, and he trusts, perhaps with good reason, that the thing that brings them together and summarizes them is football.
I doubt that Maradona's second goal against the English is art, but not for considering football unworthy of those celebrations of the soul; my doubt also reaches as far as the flowers overflowing with yellow and overwhelmed with tourism by Van Gogh. Art happens. And this exempts the work from the solemn responsibilities that the museums demand of it; the mystery of art comes by accident; as Borges pointed out, its condition as pleasure for the spirit resides in that accidental rendezvous with someone for whom that work has been secretly destined. In that same equation, of which I am ignorant now but that will turn out to be the union between you the reader and these football photographs, is where something may happen. You will know if that place where they meet should be called art or something else or maybe nothing.
*translator's note: soccer |
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